About Fear...

Last month, I wrote about fear.  Fear of embarrassing oneself is often a hitch factor in creativity.  "What if this idea is no good?"  "What if people laugh at this idea?" are pretty common ones, and that sort of fear can be paralyzing. 


But it's also exceedingly common.  It takes a long time to overcome that fear of failure, that fear of not being good enough.  Many people, and I'll add that many successful people retain that crippling fear that what they make is not fit for public consumption, and that makes them hesitate. 


Which is not to say that creation is easy, or that everything that we make is fit for public consumption.  Nickolaus Pacione has taught me that, if nothing else.  But I'll never get anywhere if I don't start.  I'll never develop good ideas if I don't work through the bad ones, and have enough of each to recognize a bad one when it presents itself.  More importantly, if I hadn't cycled through a bunch of ideas, I'll never get comfortable with the concept that ideas are easy to come by.  Ideas are cheap.  Good ideas are plentiful.  Being willing to discard mediocre ideas means that I spend less time wrangling them. Because experience has shown me that if I wait five minutes, a better idea will come up. 


Is also seems that, after five years, I'm going to hit 20,000 views of this blog.  I'm aware that the majority are Google search hits, and that I have yet to break a thousand hits in a single month.  But thank you to everyone who has read this strange personal/writing blog.